The Wading Game

Stephen LewisPieces from the author’s collection of pottery and glass from the banks of the Thames.

Business or pleasure?

I’d given this a lot of thought, but I don’t have a ready answer at Heathrow Immigration. Technically, the purpose of my trip to London is to don rubber boots and climb down onto the bank of the Thames River at low tide, where I intend to rummage in the mud for bits of garbage. Business? Not really. Not even the mudlarks I would be joining on the riverbank, the obsessed history buffs who ditched their day jobs for every good tide, got paid. But pleasure? What kind of demented person takes pleasure in wading around in a vast urban dumping ground?

Um . . . that would be me.

“Mudlark” is an old term, dating back at least to Victorian river scavengers, and their modern-day counterparts took the name for themselves with a certain inverse pride. Ask a mudlark why he’s up to his knees in muck and detritus and you’ll probably hear about something he dug up in the garden when he was a little boy, or a childhood friend with a metal detector who pulled some brilliant thing out of the earth. (This is England, after all, a country my husband, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, once said was “coming down with history.”)

Years ago, when I lived here, I developed a compulsion to dig along roadsides and in people’s back gardens (with permission, usually) and unearthed great numbers of china shards from the 18th through 20th centuries. I found the leg of a Staffordshire dog behind a stable in Oxfordshire and a bit of a late-18th-century teacup in the garden behind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s house in Somerset. (Might it have been used by the author of “Kubla Khan”? Or by that most unwelcome person from Porlock who interrupted the poem’s creation?) I brought home so much broken china that I used it to make decorative picture frames and old-fashioned memory jugs. So when I heard that there were people combing the shores of the Thames and finding the refuse of Londoners going back to the Romans and even earlier, I reached for my Wellingtons.

Most otherwise intrepid types wouldn’t willingly get up close and personal with a river that was once the primary cause of an event known as “the Great Stink.” It may be cleaner now, but there’s still the small matter of leptospirosis from rat urine in the water — and, of course, the rats themselves.

When I explain to the concierge at my hotel why I am dressed for mud at 7 a.m. on the morning of my expedition, she tells me about a friend who tried to smoke tobacco from a clay pipe he’d picked up on the foreshore, and acquired a case of dysentery for his efforts.

Steve Booker, far left, chats with some fellow scavengers.

Not so, says Steve Brooker, who claims to have smoked such pipes without ill effect. Brooker stands 6-foot-6 in his filthy rubber boots and looks very hale for someone who prefers to go barehanded into the muck, but then again the sweatshirt he’s wearing proclaims the mudlark creed, “Plague Cholera Dysentery Resistant,” and his own chosen moniker: Mud God.

Brooker fully admits that the Thames hosts a fair amount of fecal matter and charmingly describes the way the foreshore can turn brown after heavy rains (“The sewers can’t handle that amount of water, they’re all Victorian”), but to him, that’s sort of the point. “The toshers who worked in the sewers were immune to diseases because of course they were among all that human waste. Most people in that time” — the 19th century — “were dying in their 40s, but the actual toshers could go into their 80s and were really robust.”

Brooker and I have met downriver in Greenwich, right in front of the former site of the 15th-century Palace of Placentia, the birthplace of Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I. This patch of foreshore served as the palace dump, which is all too obvious even to a neophyte like myself. My unpracticed eye immediately takes in very old animal bones, boar tusks and shards of Tudor pottery, but Brooker is so sharply attuned that he can bend over a patch of ground where I see absolutely nothing and bring up literally hundreds of tiny objects: pins, coins, an 18th-century syringe used to treat syphilitic men and — the star find of our time together — a Tudor comb made of bone (one side for combing the hair, the other, finer side for combing out nits).

Refuse washed up along the Thames.

That comb has a transformative effect on Brooker, a commercial window fitter in his daily life who recently co-hosted a show, “Mud Men,” for Britain’s History Channel, and whose grinning, grime-encrusted face has appeared on billboards around London. “Your ancestors, my ancestors, weren’t kings and queens,” he says. “They were combing nits out of their hair, drinking out of jugs.” In monetary terms, he assures me, it’s worth nothing, but as an object that connects us to the past, it’s invaluable. “When you pick that comb up in your hand, that’s a personal item.”

The people attracted to mudlarking by the idea of finding treasure aren’t proper mudlarks, Brooker insists, and the ones looking only for coins aren’t much better. “Your coins of today are the same as mine. But if I get something that’s inscribed, like something in medieval writing. . . .” Two weeks earlier he found a piece of a ship’s sextant. “When I turn it over, it’s inscribed 1702.”

At his home, he tells me, he has mulched various sections of the garden with green pottery and white clay pipes, the most common of his finds. That sextant, though, is going somewhere special: “In your hand you have something no one will ever see again. It’s not about the money. It’s about the history.”

The Thames could be thought of as England’s longest archaeological site, and no fewer than 90,000 objects recovered from its foreshore are in the collection of the Museum of London, whose 30-year relationship with London mudlarks is both committed and highly regulated. I meet Meriel Jeater, one of the curators, who walks me through the collection, pointing out items found by mudlarks. There are intricate and beautiful badges, souvenirs of religious pilgrimages, all manner of dress fittings, buckles and brooches — which typically fell off as people climbed into and out of boats — as well as leather work dating back to the Romans. (The anaerobic Thames mud is an excellent preservative.) There are also a number of toys, like miniature plates and urns, knights on horseback and toy soldiers, that have actually changed the way historians view the period. “We used to say there wasn’t much of a sense of childhood,” Jeater tells me. “People didn’t care so much about their children because they might die, and they were sent out to work. The pewter toys the mudlarks discovered showed that parents in London were buying their children toys.”

Because there are so few certified mudlarks (about 50 in all) and their fraternity, the Society of Thames Mudlarks, is very hard to join, I ask Brooker whether there’s competition, but he says it’s the opposite. “As long as somebody’s having something up, that’s good.” And indeed, the people we meet on the foreshore seem more than friendly, greeting one another with the apparently ritual “Show us your bits!” or “What you had up?” Since there are many variables affecting what’s on the ground (including the tide, the weather and even the number of boats, whose wakes wash mud off the foreshore), the surface will look different every single time out, lending the whole endeavor a bit of the gambler’s thrill. “I know good areas and I know what to look for, but at the end of the day it’s luck,” Brooker says.

Another score is plucked from the river.

It’s the mudlarks, he explains, who bring honor and order to the enterprise, making sure people play by the rules and register their finds. Every single object, he insists, is part of a massive history puzzle, and anyone who picks something up and takes it home is essentially hiding a puzzle piece from the rest of the world. Some of the puzzle pieces Brooker’s found have included a Roman sandal, a 17th-century prisoner’s ball and chain and a pot lid from a jar of bear’s grease, a purported cure for baldness. “Me, being bald, just by having that pot lid,” he says, “it’s just a brilliant story about how in the 1880s there were people who believed they would get their hair back.” The object he currently pines for is a cannon on the riverbed at Rotherhithe, on the south bank. The cannon torments him, sometimes emerging from the water at low tide, sometimes not, but he’s never been able to get to it and bring it up. “It could be off a really famous ship, we don’t know yet,” he says with a sigh. “It’s always playing with your mind.”

As for me, the Victorian china I’ve been gathering may be beneath Brooker’s notice (after a few more times out, he assures me, I won’t even bother picking it up), but I am thoroughly hooked. From now on, any trip to London is going to involve a look at the tide tables on the Port of London Authority Web site, and my trusty Wellies. And maybe a tetanus shot. But I’m definitely coming back.

ESSENTIALS: MUDLARKING

The rules pertaining to mudlarking are complicated, with some foreshores owned by the Crown and others owned by the Port of London Authority (pla.co.uk), whose Web site provides tide tables and permit applications. Travelers who wish to experience mudlarking should contact the Thames Explorer Trust (thames-explorer.org.uk), which schedules guided walks along the foreshore.

To take many mudlarking finds out of the country requires an export license; for information about obtaining one, contact the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (mla.gov.uk). The Museum of London works with members of the public to record archaeological findings through the Portable Antiquities Scheme (finds.org.uk). The Society of Thames Mudlarks is small (about 50 members) and not open to the public. Steve Brooker’s Thames and Field offshoot is more accessible (thamesandfield.com), with thousands of photographs of club members’ finds.